I'm not going to go into an expansive discussion on proper control group design in the social sciences (and biology often is a social science, especially when it is applied in the wider world), mainly because that's pretty much the entirety of my first and second years' lab work and associated tutorials (especially the second year's).
And I really can't be arsed to write that much, frankly.
I didn't complete my course for a reason (CFS doesn't give me a lot of stamina).
Even with using fish and not people, they still did a few things that would have a, say, neurologist over a barrel when facing their contemporaries.
They had a perfectly serviceable set of null baselines for comparison. Sure, we'd not know about fish being this degree of really good at the game of swapsies (but, frankly, we probably should have guessed — when it comes to increasing their odds when gambling on breeding and adapting, fish don't do half-measures). But, from a pure design perspective and for what they were seeking to investigate? They produced this mess of a "control". It's not one: it's actually a dual-run, dyed-in-the-wool experimental group mistaken for a control.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Jul 11th 2020 at 3:15:41 PM
Biology a social science is an odd take.
Arthropods usually have an IKEA approach to hybrid prevention; tab A doesn't fit in slot B.
I remember wondering when I was a kid if Helix snails could breed with Arion slugs, even keeping them together. Didn't pan out, but I was 8 or so.
Edited by Eriorguez on Jul 11th 2020 at 4:23:42 PM
When dealing with population of critters? Social. Cells talking to each other as kind of critters? Social.
Effing up the control by not nulling properly regardless of how squishy or hard the science? Old hat: it's the woods-and-trees style of hypothesis-induced blinkers from early on in the design. :/
EDIT: Oooooooh — just a thought: monocotyledonous plants! Betcha that's who fish are closest to in style when it comes to playing the breeding game.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Jul 11th 2020 at 3:42:29 PM
@Marqfja: "That aside... So the mass distrubtion being biased towards the abdomen and the flexible articulation between it and the cephalothorax doesn't actually reduce much the effective weight that gets applied in such a situation in comparison to, say, a horse of similar mass doing the same action?"
Imagine someone drops a brick on your head. Ouch. Now imagine that the brick is attached via a nonflexible iron bar to a schoolbus. Normally, when the brick hit your head, your head would act as a fulcrum allowing the schoolbus to swivel downward and strike the ground. In this case, however, someone has bent the iron bar upward so that the schoolbus is actually suspended above the brick. You will receive the full weight of both objects upon your head.
re Control Groups. The purpose of a control group is to examine what happens to the subject population in the absence of a treatment condition. In this case, the treatment condition was irradiating the sperm. They allowed unirradiated sperm to fertilize the eggs so that any difference between the two outcomes would be due entirely to the radiation. I am not very familiar with the phenomenon of gynogenesis, and I didn't realize that one could induce this in Sturgeon, but I presume that they wanted to demonstrate that, if the attempt was a failure, it wasn't due to the radiation process. What I can't quite figure out from a quick reading the original article is whether the hybrids came from the unirradiated sperm alone or from both groups, so I can't tell if the control and treatment groups had different outcomes or not. If they did, then it's a good thing they had the control group, or they wouldn't know that these two species were genetically compatible. Presumably the results of this study will help us better predict the genetic compatibility of other species (it might also improve our understanding of gynogenesis). What we need now is a different kind of control group—two equally related species of fish that cannot cross-hybridize, so that we can figure out what the difference is.
@Eriorguez: a nitpick—subsaharan people do possess Neanderthal genes. It's thought to be the result of back-migration after the Homo Sapiens breakout from Africa.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
Except for genocide, rape, bridal capture and all the other wonders perpetrated over the last 800-900 years by other groups of humans. <_<
The San (or Khoe or Khoekhoe or what emerges in the next century) have had a horrible 1 000 years.
I doubt there's such a thing as a pristine genetic lineage at this point.
Well, I can't speak specifically to the San people, or any other group within Africa. The sources I found speak about genetic samples from "five African sub-populations" but fail to specify which ones. But on average, sub-saharan populations do carry detectable amounts of Neanderthal dna.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Old article I pulled out from my bookmarks: Before North American natives settled on the "Three Sisters" of maize, squash and beans as their primary crops, they cultivated many other plants that didn't manage to take off.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" devotes part of a chapter to that subject. From page 145 of the trade paperback (2017):
"Alas, despite their nutritional advantage, most of these eastern U.S. crops suffered from serious disadvantages in other respects. Goosefoot, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass had tiny seeds, with volumes only one-tenth that of wheat and barley seeds. Worse yet, sumpweed is a wind-pollinated relative of ragweed, the notorious hayfever-causing plant. Like ragweed's, sumpweed's pollen can cause hayfever where the plant occurs in abundant stands. If that doesn't kill your enthusiasm for becoming a sumpweed farmer, be aware that it has a strong odor objectionable to some people and that handling it can cause skin irritation."
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Modern historians do tend to be critical of "grand theory" narratives that credit big, sweeping developments to a single factor. That applies to both older "Great Man" views of history and Diamond's "geographic determinism" narrative.
Guns, Germs and Steel puts forward a lot of interesting points, but it kind of goes too far in minimising the role of human agency. Though it's still a good introductory counter-narrative if you grew up on the Great Man stuff.
A newer work along that line that I have a soft spot for is James C. Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, which basically argues that late Neolithic "hunter-gatherers" enjoyed a rich, energy-efficient diet and relatively open lifestyles and were only forced into the bondage and misery of early intensive agriculture by the sudden hardships of the Younger Dryas period. Part of it is because it's less mainstream and I'm hipster filth, part of it is because the way it frames its central thesis is just so hilariously radical ("Did you know that grains domesticated us?") that it made for a fascinating read throughout, even if it weren't completely bulletproof.
Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jul 13th 2020 at 8:50:34 AM
One day, we will read his name in the news and cheer.I took an online History of Architecture course that went all the way back to hunter-gatherer societies, and the prof made the argument that agriculture was a reaction to a lack of resources rather than to an abundance of resources. And that hunter-gatherer societies had a lot more leisure time.
He also didn’t like the term “hunter-gatherer”.
Edited by Galadriel on Jul 13th 2020 at 12:07:41 PM
I mean, people are just people, right? There are no superior societies, just as there never were any inferior ones. Every culture is just about equally complex, given the challenges they face. I remember how long anthropology resisted the idea of organized violence before historical times. Some of it is scientific skepticism, but part of it is romanticizing non-Western lifestyles, which is just another way to patronize them.
If I understand Diamond's argument correctly, domestication was a response to an abundance of resources (of potentially domesticable species). Probably, it took a certain minimum population density for large scale domestication to work, which would mean that populations were growing during the Neolithic even before formal domestication.
Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 13th 2020 at 3:37:52 PM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.To a certain extent, yes, people are just people. We can probably assume that late stone age people were just like us. Of course, the further you go back, the less that becomes true. You'd reach a point where you really have to say, no, this is not a modern human, and he is not quite like us.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times

TFW accidentally play God.
Disgusted, but not surprised